Engaging with Victorian scientific texts, popular and specialist periodicals and the work of leading mid-century novelists, including Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte and Wilkie Collins, Stella Pratt-Smith traces the synthesis of nineteenth-century electricity made possible by the combination of science, literature and the popular imagination. She examines how the emergence of the science fiction genre endowed electricity with magical and romantic qualities, and contributed to wider scientific visions of the future.